LOS ANGELES _ Dressed in flowing black slacks and a shimmery black shirt, she danced, clapping and bouncing to the beat. She clasped hands with people in the seats above her, compelling them to join in as "Can't Stop the Feeling" by Justin Timberlake blared overhead.
Soon, whole sections of the arena moved with her.
The start of an NCAA regional semifinal gymnastics meet was moments away, and No. 2-ranked UCLA was in Ann Arbor, Mich. But its coach looked right at home.
Just off center stage. Dancing. Smiling. Connecting with the music and the people around her.
Per usual, Valorie Kondos Field seemed carefree _ at a time she had every reason to be feeling pressure.
UCLA was about to take another important step toward defending the national title it won last season, and the Bruins wanted to send their coach out with another championship. Kondos Field, whose teams have won seven national titles in her 29 years at the helm, is retiring after this season.
Coaches, like athletes, rarely go out on top. But Kondos Field, 59, appears to be the exception. UCLA has been dominant all season _ her gymnasts have 21 perfect scores of 10, more than double that of any other college team _ and her pending departure has raised the stakes for each performance.
UCLA won the regional semifinal, securing one of eight team spots in the national championship meet Friday and Saturday in Fort Worth. Oklahoma, which led last year until the final event and narrowly defeated the Bruins in a dual meet this season, is formidable competition. A few more 10s would help, but the coach teaches her gymnasts to strive for excellence rather than perfection.
"I develop superheroes," she likes to say.
Maybe that's why goodbye has been so difficult. For so long, no matter how many times she practiced in her head saying it _ this will be my last season with UCLA gymnastics _ she couldn't say it out loud. Not to her husband, Bobby Field; not to herself in the mirror, or on her drive home from work or in her diary. She nicked quotation marks on the page instead.
"Imagine going to work every single day and being inspired by the people that you are surrounded by," Kondos Field said earlier this season. "Imagine going to work every single day ... and within the first five minutes you have 20 hugs. People say, 'Good morning, Miss Val!'
"That's what I'm choosing to give up."
The glass sliding doors of the UCLA practice gym were open, letting in soft sunlight from a courtyard where students lifted weights one morning this week. From the doorway, Kondos Field studied gymnasts practicing beam routines.
The Bruins were scattered about, some drilling with coaches, others training independently. While working, they shared laughter and quiet conversation.
While gymnastics can be rapt in the pursuit of perfection, Kondos Field prefers a relaxed practice. There is a difference between fun and joy, she says, between perfection and excellence. She doesn't bark orders. Often, she watches quietly, giving one-on-one feedback.
When athletes peak, the coach said, "they're not super serious, rigid, stone. They are in that very narrow lane of excellence that they're in command of it, and in that command of it ... you see their spirits soar.
"My goal is to coach them up to be in that zone as often as possible. So why would I want to take the joy out of it?"
Before UCLA hired Kondos Field as an assistant in 1983, she was a ballet dancer with no background in gymnastics or any other organized sport. Born in Sacramento, her father was a painter, her mother a hairdresser. She was first exposed to gymnastics when she took a job playing piano music to accompany floor routines at a local club.
As she learned more about the sport, she became a gymnastics choreographer. But then her career as a dancer took off and she moved to Washington to join the Washington Ballet.
One stage prepared her for another.
Kondos Field urges the Bruins to smile on balance beam, approach the vault runway with a confident strut and make eye contact with the audience during their floor exercises. The approach offers no guaranteed benefit to a gymnast's score. But as a dancer, Kondos Field fell in love with performing, with being enveloped in rhythm. She wants her athletes to experience that feeling too.
She has embraced unconventional approaches. Her gymnasts take personality tests and self-defense classes; they hold trivia and public speaking competitions. Some of the pursuits are more successful than others, but the goal is always the same _ personal growth.
"The No. 1 thing I admire about Val's character is that she is fearful of literally nothing," associate head coach Chris Waller said. "She has no fear of failure. It's not something that is in her vocabulary."
Among her mentors was the late John Wooden, UCLA's legendary basketball coach. One of Wooden's books defined success as being your best self, not winning, and that approach helped Kondos Field stay the course when the team struggled her first two seasons. She grew close with Wooden after her husband Bobby Field, a former UCLA assistant football coach and associate athletic director, invited the coach to dinner one night in 1998.
Wooden sparked another turning point for Kondos Field, boosting the confidence she had in her developing coaching style, when they did an interview together in the mid-2000s. A reporter remarked that Kondos Field was becoming another Wooden. Blasphemy! Kondos Field thought. She was about to say as much when Wooden interjected.
"Why would she want to be another John Wooden," she recalled him saying, "when she could be a great Valorie Kondos Field?"
